Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Monday, December 12, 2016

Attack of the Russian Spambots

Spam, by definition, is
unwanted, irrelevant, or inappropriate information sent indiscriminately to large
numbers of recipients over the internet.
Some spam may simply be a form of advertisement. On the darker side, some spam is for phishing:
seeking to obtain personal information.
Other types of spam may lead users to internet addresses where malware
is present.

About a month before the
election, I linked my blog to Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a powerful web analytic service that generates reports
on web traffic for a given website—in this case, the blog you are now reading. Analytics will track the number of sessions,
session length, the number of new and returning users, the country and city of
origin for users, and revenue where such is involved. With Google Analytics, a smarter person than
me can drill down even deeper.

Early into working with
the analytics reports, I began to see three to five blog “sessions” daily from users
in Russia. Most originated from St.
Petersburg. A few originated from
Moscow. The sessions were, in fact, spam
hitting my blog page. Rather than
showing a language associated with them (as other sessions do), this was shown
on my report:Secret.ɢoogle.com
You are invited! Enter only with this ticket URL. Copy it. Vote for Trump!

Probably not a link you
want to follow home.

These daily spam hits
continued until a few days after the election and then they went away. I have since read a bit about this sort
activity. Russia is a notorious home for
internet junk and hacking activities.

Below, I have posted two
screen captures from my Google Analytics reports that show exactly what I am
talking about.

At present, there is suspicion
that someone in Russia used the internet and hacking practices for purposes of
tinkering with our election. This does
not strike me as particularly wild speculation given what I already know. This stuff is, at a minimum, annoying. But given our ever-increasing reliance on the
internet in all things, malicious activity on the internet is dangerous.

2 comments:

Russia, like China, is known to be a hotbed for hackers and others who are into internet espionage. I can believe that Russia meddled in our election process. How? I still have to learn that. But the possibility is high. Putin and Trump have been cozying up with each other even before the elections.